Not yet a priority for brands
Despite the recent surge, Bluesky’s user base is still dwarfed by its rivals. As of Nov. 21, it had over 21 million users, a fraction of the 275 million monthly users that Meta’s Threads claimed in October and 600 million that Musk’s X claimed in May.
For most brands, it’s enough of an opportunity to reserve their handles on Bluesky, but that’s it.
Media buyers and social media managers think the platform could be a promising new playground for brands eventually, but it’s too early to tell.
“It’s a long way from having the kind of scale that matters to cause advertisers to care,” said Brian Wieser, principal at Madison and Wall.
Sustaining growth as a social network is hard: the past few years are littered with fleeting moments and few success stories, with giants like Meta hoovering up the majority of people’s time and marketer’s dollars.
“Commercially speaking, there hasn’t been a meaningful new platform since TikTok,” said Wieser.
Bluesky doesn’t currently have an advertising offering and CEO Jay Graber has expressed a reticence to change that, telling Wired in February that “we can’t enshittify the network with ads.”
Should it embrace ads, it would be unlikely to do so in a traditional way. Bluesky’s design necessitates the least annoying ads possible, otherwise users, in control of their algorithms, could simply filter them out.
“The brand potential is not going to look like what advertisers have come to expect from new social media platforms because Bluesky is not looking to make advertising a core revenue source,” said Elijah Harris, EVP of impact investment at IPG Mediabrands. “For advertisers, that means adapting video content for a new platform is likely not going to cut it.”
Courting creators
Marketing to Bluesky’s users through creators might be the most logical path ahead for brands.
The platform has already drawn in a crop of celebrities and journalists who have been encouraging their followers to decamp from the “toxicity” of X over the past few weeks.
To many, Bluesky represents a return to early Twitter, a platform where users could engage with like-minded people “without the noise, without the ads, and without the divisiveness,” that has become synonymous with X, said Neujahr.
Bluesky could also benefit from creators’ growing frustration with shadow bans on TikTok, where the platform reduces the visibility of some accounts without notification.
